Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics articles from January 1 2003

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics archives from January 1 2003

Turkish Alevi poetry in the twentieth century: the fusion of political and religious identities.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... This article examines Turkish Alevi poetry in the twentieth century focusing on how the Alevi community integrates political issues within a traditionally religious genre. The figure of Kemal Ataturk, the state ideology of Kemalism, and the...

Pilgrim clouds: the polymorphous sacred in Indo-Muslim imagination.
January 1, 2003... This article explores one Urdu poem of the early twentieth century, by the Indian poet Sayyid Muhammad "Muhsin" Kakorvi. "In Praise of the Best of Messengers" includes imagery of shape-shifting clouds that the poet skillfully uses to evoke the...

Rilke's Duino angels and the angels of Islam.(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... This article's point of departure is Rilke's specification that the angels of his Duino Elegies are not to be equated with Christian ones, being more comparable to Islamic angels. Existing efforts to apply this notion to the Duino Elegies have...

La poesie impie ou le sacre du poete: sur quelques modernes.(abstract in English; text in French)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... In France, the "modern" generation of poets--like Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud--had the ambition to give birth to a new conception of the sacred. Until then, the sacred was the experience of a transcendence whose inscrutable profundity...

Floire and Blancheflor: courtly hagiography or radical romance?
January 1, 2003... In the late twelfth-century Old French aristocratic version of Floire and Blancheflor, the writer employs sacred forms to subvert Church ideology. In this romance, the writer uses Christian iconography and narrative conventions to elaborate the...

Moi aussi, je suis musulman: Rai, Islam, and masculinity in Maghrebi transnational identity.
January 1, 2003... This article focuses on North African Rai music as a fertile and explosive site of gendered and transnational Maghrebi identity, exploring two separate yet related paths. The first is the "Rai versus Islam" binary, which the article...

Three in one divinity.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... This essay is a personal testimony by a contemporary Egyptian poet whose childhood was marked by the local mosque in which his grandfather served. He reveals how his upbringing and reading had led him to waver between two patterns of divine...

A reading in the book of flesh.
January 1, 2003... In "Ruju' al-Shaykh" (The Return of the Sheik) by Egyptian writer 'Abd al-Hakim Qasim, several stylistic modes intersect: erotic treatise, religious journey, and biographical account. The complex style alludes to the Islamic narrative of the...

The beautiful and the sacred in art and religion.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... This article asserts that the experience of the beautiful and the sacred were joined, but for historical and political reasons they became separated; in fact at times they are seen as opposed and even contradictory. The article presents their...

New poetry and sacred masks: a reading in medieval poetic discourse.
January 1, 2003... The article addresses what has come to be known in medieval Arabic criticism as "new poetry," while exploring sacralization from two angles--artistic and cultural. Artistically, the study analyzes the position of medieval critics who rejected...

Institutionalizing the Sacred: the case of al-Shafi'i.
January 1, 2003... Cultures produce types of sacralization to control people by imbuing certain notions, works, and figures with the sublime that transcends reality and history. This creates a field which lies beyond and above critical thinking. The article...

Revolutionary fiction and fictional revolution: a new reading of The Children of Gabalawi.
January 1, 2003... Naguib Mahfouz's novel, Awlad Haritna (The Children of Gabalawi), has provoked polemics among traditional and modernist intellectuals, each group defending its turf. This new reading, based on Bourdieu's sociology of literary production, views...

Dostoevsky: the dialectic of skepticism and faith.
January 1, 2003... This article deals with Dostoyevsky's rapport with God and the issues that spring from such a relation: death, resurrection, immortality, and virtue. Dostoyevsky's relation with God maintained its multi-dimensional nature: his faith in God was...

Busiri's Burda: an overview and correspondences.
January 1, 2003... The long poem Burda by Busiri--a widely disseminated and recited religious poem--is made up of two parts and an introduction. The first part praises the Prophet; the second is a poetic address to the Prophet followed by appeals to him. The...

Authorship in Sufi poetry.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... This article explores authorship in the Sufi poetry of Egypt. How do we explain apparent paradoxes: attribution of new poetry to an old saint, to more than one person, or to a performer? The Sufi's world includes a close-knit spiritual-social...

Lire dans le parcours d'une creation (a partir de la surate XCVI du Coran) *.(abstract in English; text in French)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... The article offers a new reading of the Qur'an by examining the linguistic structure of the sacred text, starting with the multiple and varied lexical occurrence of "reading" in the Qur'an. The article moves from the notion of reading as it...

The dilemma of the literary approach to the Qur'an.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... The principal intention of this article is to discuss some of the difficulties that challenge a literary approach to the Qur'an, an approach that focuses on the Qur'an as basically a literary text. Such an approach was invoked by Amin al-Khuli...

Literature and the sacred.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... The article focuses on the intellectual and religious problems facing the researcher using literary methodology, when approaching religious texts in general and the Qur'an in particular. The article recounts the 1947 controversy over a doctoral...